[tailspin2019]

This is cool. I've recently been thinking about getting a "burner" number for sharing outside my immediate circle.

Same for email - the idea would be to have a phone/email for public consumption and then a separate address and number for my inner circle of family/friends.

[vineyardmike]

Not worth it. I have a Google Voice number (free, easy, good UX). Now it’s a constant juggle of “which number did I give”. Especially since you presumably have already given away your current number. Even if you go all-in on burner number, there’s a question of longevity and risk. Do you give it to government? Do you give it to banks? Etc

[tailspin2019]

Yeah, very good points. I hadn't thought of the "which number did I give" complication.

[kroltan]

I do the same thing with e-mail addresses, and solve this by storing it in my password manager.

Phone numbers don't quite have the same dynamic, but just having the ability of throwing a given problematic number away would already solve so much.

[vineyardmike]

> throwing a given problematic number away would already solve so much.

The search space of valid numbers is very small compared to email. A throw away number is surely a number that has already been trashed by dozens of users before you. It’d be useless unless you can make everyone forget it between users.

My personal cell number is 20 years old and gets almost no spam besides a rare robo call. Any throw away number I’ve acquire has a sordid history of being used as a honeypot it seems because it’s a cesspool.

[nicholasjarnold]

Same. Though for email there are good services like Fastmail (and likely many others) which already offer this and other benefits for a nominal subscription fee.

I haven't implemented this idea yet, but what stops us from just buying Twilio credits, getting a number through them and then writing a bit of glue code to their API to pull down SMS messages (for things like 2-factor codes, etc) and route them wherever we find personally convenient? Maybe Twilio is also selling our customer data paired with these numbers to data brokers, though, IDK. It's just a fleeting idea I've had.

[madamelic]

Here you go: https://github.com/qnzl/twilio-basic-server

Go wild. Gets you like 90% of the way there.

[nicholasjarnold]

Thank you! I'm going to check this out. A question about a comment you made elsewhere herein:

> My caveat about this is some services will silently ignore you if you try to use a virtual number. It's more useful for IRL where you don't want to throw your real number around much.

How, specifically, do other services detect this? Is it like with IP address space where it's possible to determine things like "this C block belongs to Entity X, Inc"? Are you aware of mechanisms to avoid this detection/blocking that don't require using a "real" number.

[madamelic]

> How, specifically, do other services detect this?

I don't actually know specifically. I assume there are two different ways:

- The service is using Verify / Authy, which is owned by Twilio so likely Twilio themselves discourage it

- Looking up the number either through Twilio or some sort of central subscriber database. All virtual numbers are described as virtual numbers.

> Are you aware of mechanisms to avoid this detection/blocking that don't require using a "real" number.

Definitely gets into ethically gray areas since that would be super useful to nefarious people. I don't actually know for sure. I know from the recent Blizzard mobile 2FA controversy that this issue expands to also prepaid phone numbers.

So I don't know of a definitive way to get around it beyond using a postpaid number.

Somewhat related, near the end of my above mentioned service, I had pivoted into trying to launch a "21st century phone service" complete with SIM cards provided by Twilio.

The issue? They were still considered virtual numbers. At the time, in Twilio's defense, I was somewhat misusing their service because their SIMs were intended for IoT purposes not actual cellphone usage. That's all to say, it's likely provider / subscriber level vs something you can individually spoof.

[blep_]

Twilio, at least, has an API specifically for looking up the carrier of a phone number. (You can't do it based on number ranges, because portability.)

[jacooper]

License please!

[madamelic]

Pushed up a LICENSE document (MIT).

[tailspin2019]

> what stops us from just buying Twilio credits, getting a number through them

I was considering exactly this, or potentially getting a second mobile number via eSIM on my phone (which feels a bit more "permanent" but that might be delusion...)

[srhngpr]

Simple and free solutions exist for this exact purpose: TextNow, Fongo, etc. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33169096

[returnInfinity]

If you put your real phone number in your Resume and share it with a recruiter, consider your phone number public.

Also LinkedIn will give away your contact details.

Your Bank or any service important to you may get hacked and your phone number leaked.

[lucb1e]

I feel like we have very different expectations of what recruiters can and will do with personal information. I'm from within the EU, you?

Not that they don't share your email to other persons working for the same company (I've had some name I never heard of from RecruitCorp email me seven years after I last talked to someone from RecruitCorp), or I could imagine they keep their contacts when moving into / out of self-employment, but that's a far cry from public.

[Nextgrid]

As someone in the UK and used to dealing with UK-based recruitment agencies, I didn't understand the recruiter hate until I had my first experience with one of those shitty "agencies" that claims to be in the UK (or whatever they're targeting) but is actually ran from a third-world call center right next to the tech support scammers. When it comes to those, obviously all bets are off when it comes to your personal information, and the recruitment industry in the US seems to be saturated with this scum much more so than in the EU.

However, even legitimate recruiters can be a problem if you get too many of them. I recently had to rotate my business number because I was getting pretty much one call a day from someone wanting to "have a chat". They're all nice, courteous and seem to know what they're doing, but the sheer quantity became a major problem especially when you're already fully booked and aren't open to new business.